


like a lantern down a dark lane

by clytemnestras



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Background Relationships, Dream Sequences, F/M, Fire Powers, Hair-pulling, Hell Trauma, M/M, Minor Prudence/Ambrose and Prudence/Roz, Multi, POV Multiple, Polyamory, Telepathic Bond, Threesome - F/M/M, part 4 au, some slight power play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:42:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28295505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: In which Sabrina, Nick and Harvey look for something to hold on to, and Roz finds herself on the precipice of greatness(a possible part-4)((Happy endings only))
Relationships: Harvey Kinkle/Nicholas Scratch/Sabrina Spellman
Comments: 12
Kudos: 65
Collections: hekiv's CAOS collection





	like a lantern down a dark lane

**Author's Note:**

> As someone who usually writes brief, ephemeral character study one shots I can heartily say I don't know how this happened. Can't wait for it to be rendered non canon in a handful of days!
> 
> Title from Virginia Woolf:  
>  _My body goes before me, like a lantern down a dark lane, bringing one thing after another out of darkness into a ring of light. I dazzle you; I make you believe that this is all._

Any moment now, the exhaustion will fling itself to the far corner of her bedroom, beside the tincture bottles Hilda once filled to the brim with lavender concoctions to keep bad dreams at bay, and Sabrina will feel the way she's supposed to. Relieved, that is. That the world is spinning somewhere on the axis of right. That she is once again only straddling two worlds instead of the untenable three. That the warm flush of renewed power is still curled up behind her ribcage, since her stint in stone down below. Zelda had spent years reminding her to bury her crystals to charge their energies, and maybe all the carbon and iron and other elements that make up her body can be fed by that same vibration.

Any moment now, really. Delight will light up her features, the joy of actually having her life back, her friends, her family, her collection of vintage horror VHS tapes that have been steadily gathering dust since her sixteenth birthday.

Salem mews at her from his place at the end of her bed and does not raise his head. 

"Yeah, yeah, I know. Everything I wanted. I should be grateful. Blah blah." 

He mews again, opening one eye and licking the back of a dark paw so he can flick it dismissively behind his ear, then curls himself up once again.

"Rude." 

She edges her way downstairs, still tangled in the lull of exhaustion and desperate for a mug of Hilda's energising tea, black loose leaf and sweet orange to buzz through the cobwebs, cinnamon for a touch of warmth.

She has just about reached the last step when the doorbell rings. 

Ambrose is there in quite literally a blink of an eye, his body bristled into the distinctive curve of a hangover. Sabrina can see that his eyes are light fearing little slits when he throws open the door. 

"Rosalind, what a delight." His voice does not reach above a tired monotone, and, after glancing briefly over his shoulder and catching Sabrina edging forward, he disappears again, presumably to somewhere he can be prostrate.

Sabrina can feel the tension on Roz before she manages to speak, a faint stormy blue outlining her body.

Roz holds her hands out as she stumbles over the threshold, palms up, eyes dark. "Sabrina, I think something is wrong."

_Okay_ , Sabrina thinks, _this is more like it._

*

It takes him a moment to recognise where he is, the warm faint smell of dust and damp a different beast to the drafty halls of the academy. Nicholas Scratch is not entirely sure how or why he is waking up on the extraordinarily uncomfortable couch in the garage Sabrina's little gaggle of humans call a clubhouse, but is at least gratified to work out he's alone.

He closes his eyes, pressing his palms against them to clear the disorienting fog. His hands are warm, and that feels like a revelation, too.

The last thing he remembers is Prudence, her hand on his knee, defences lowered and grief bleeding through. It was a sad, warped little mirror of the time he had spent entangled in them, the sisters, where they could tug on their connection to one another and somehow he would be the one dancing. He spent months brushing up against their ironclad ties to one another, looking for something to tether himself to. On the steps of the academy with Prudence's head on his shoulder and the onslaught of her guilt, the ache of Dorcas like a phantom limb slipping past his defenses, Nick couldn't help but be relieved he had never pushed his way in. He is too dyed in the wool to ache for mental violation. 

Still, he knew in the moment, feeling her bowing beneath the weight of her sisters' shadows that he'd let her use him. Take it out on him, somewhat insensate to the pain, now. Even after the Dark Lord. After Sabrina. (After _Dorian.)_ As much as Nick tells himself he is done with being a vessel for more powerful forces to move through, he'd still give himself up for a girl who asked nicely enough. 

Prudence felt that, of course. His body like a beacon, and his mind like a slate. Her nails curled sharply against the skin of his thigh, like a cat kneading in affection, and she pressed her dark painted mouth to his forehead and blinked him away.

_You were always delicate beneath it, Nicky._ Her voice, like a memory. _I can't have something so fragile getting in my way._

Still, it doesn't quite account for… Here. The _how_ to the _why_.

He parses the thought, making his way around the dusty room and taking in the fingerprint touches of the mortal's personalities. A half deflated basketball lurks in the corner, tucked behind the guitar cases, notebooks, sketchbooks, broken CD cases and back-bent biographies. The room swells with humanity. He wonders if he stayed here awhile he'd be person enough to leave a mark.

He thumbs open one of the books, about a Sister Rosetta, his hand catching on the first page. It's a sketch, something both ornate and indellably lifelike, of Sabrina's friend, Rosalind, her hands clutching the outline of a bass guitar. 

"Oh God, what now," Harvey stands in the doorway, a silhouette against the golden dawn, looking about as tired as Nick feels.

"I come in peace, Harry. No disaster that I know of." 

Harvey eyes him warily, seems reluctant to step into the room lest something crawls out of the walls to swallow him. That is, until his eyes meet Nick's hands, the book he's studying, the sketch of his sweet little girlfriend.

"Hey, that's private." He bounds forward and grabs the book from Nick's hands, snapping it shut and curling it into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket. "Didn't your parents ever teach you not to take what doesn't belong to you?"

Nick schools his face and looks up at Harvey through his lashes. "I'm an orphan, so no." 

That gets him. Harvey's face crumples into something like guilt, the very picture of contrition, and Nick thinks, _Oh, this might be fun._

"I'm sorry, man. I didn't know, I wouldn't have -" 

The boy is clutching for something Nick won't give him, but it's a darling sight nonetheless. "You draw that?"

He gestures to the book, Harvey's hand curling around it instinctively. His knuckles are rough, dusted with dirt and scraped up skin.

"Yeah I. I'm an artist. It's kinda what I do."

"It's good," Nick tells him, smiling his most honest of smiles. "You got any more?"

Harvey looks at him, his face flitting between delight and wary bewilderment. "I have a few around."

"Can I see them?" 

Harvey's brows lower, his mouth a tight line.

Definitely fun.

*

Before either of them have managed to get their bearings, Hilda has bundled Roz inside and pressed a cup of warm chamomile tea into her hands and Sabrina gathers the troops - that is to say, Ambrose and Zelda, Marie curled into the latter's side. 

"It's the cunning," Roz tells them over the lip of her china cup. "It's getting… bigger. I think something happened when I helped you guys with the Hecate ritual, because every vision I've had since has been brighter, more tactile. It's like I don't just see things, or even get a taste - I'm entirely in the moment, feeling it as it rolls through." She keeps fiddling with her fingers, not meeting any of their eyes.

"Hey," Sabrina says, trying to catch her gaze, "It's okay. There's nothing you're gonna tell us that will shock us, believe me."

It's a mistake, Sabrina can tell, because Roz drops her head again and swallows, hard. "I'm not so sure that's true."

Zelda, lighting her cigarette with a tealight burning on the mantle, rolls her eyes and snaps, "Well, out with it girl, we don't have all day."

Aunt Hilda hisses a _Zelds_ , just as Sabrina leans across the table and tries to tangle hers and Roz's fingers. "Roz, you're my best friend. Whatever it is, we can deal with it together."

Roz tries for a smile, but pulls her hand just slightly out of reach. "Well. So, remember when I asked you if you still had feelings for Harvey? I only asked because I had this vision. Actually I kept having it, over and over whenever we kissed, of you and him making out on his bed. Except lately I've not just been _seeing_ it. It's like I'm in your skin - I can feel his hands on you, the change in his kisses. The way he pulls you down against him and your skin gets all hot and -"

"I think that's rather enough, dear." Hilda says, cheeks bunching.

"I thought it was rather fun," Ambrose supplies, slumped in the far chair, legs up on the table.

"Sorry," Roz says, her cheeks taking on a deeper colour. "It's just, like I said. Vivid, like I'm in your body, experiencing him through you."

Sabrina blinks. She tries to absorb it, knowing vividly what Harvey's warm, weighty touch feels like on her skin, and yet she cannot find the feeling behind it. Even his name, _Harvey_ , has a rounded edge to her, like prodding at anaesthetised gums before a wisdom tooth extraction. A touch only made noticeable in its absence.

She makes herself smile, just a little, just enough. "Roz, I really need you to know I would _never_ \- I don't feel that way about Harvey anymore." She reaches across the table again, brushing her fingers against Roz's forearm like it could give the sentence some kind of anchor.

Roz smiles back at her but still draws herself away, and Sabrina doesn't know what to take from that.

"Either way," she says. "I still can't touch him without feeling your touch, 'Brina."

"Sabrina," Hilda says, softly. "Let the girl finish her story."

"I think that's mostly it?" Roz seems to have decided the faces of everyone else assembled are a safer bet than Sabrina's, her eyes flitting around the room as she speaks. "It's just that _everything_ is more intense now, and it's almost bleeding out of the edges of the visions. Sometimes I think I can see these faint white lines running across everything, pulling at people's sternums. Sometimes I just have to think about someone to get an onslaught."

"That's an awful lot to be dealing with, my dear." Hilda pushes the plate of sugar cookies cooling on the table in Roz's direction, smiling when she accepts one. "No magic in those," she says. "But they might help, anyway."

"I don't think it's so much of a mystery," Marie says, her chin cradled in her hand.

Sabrina does not miss the way Zelda smiles down at her, the way she, unthinkingly fixes the dressing down when it slips off of Marie's shoulder.

"You're a seer, ma cherie" Marie tells Roz, warmly, leaning over to cup her hands over the mug of chamomile tea. "Whatever made you think that was different from a witch's magic?"

Zelda comes around Marie, resting a hand on her shoulder, smoke curling around her from her trailing cigarette. "You've always been the most studious of the waifs and strays Sabrina has brought home, Rosalind, dear. Wouldn't you like to learn more about what you're capable of? Wouldn't you like to be the most powerful person in the room?"

Roz's gaze flicks up, finally, finds Sabrina's again. And Sabrina feels that _good morning_ smile finally break out, her jaw aching from it, not sure what emotion is pulling at her threads. 

* 

Harvey cannot quite get a grip on what to make of Nick Scratch.

The guy who had swanned in, tousled and (other)worldly and radiating something that could be power but is _definitely_ sex, and swept everything Harvey centred his world by out from underneath him. The guy who he willingly walked through hell to help rescue, that he had literally carried out from the depths. The guy who is currently chewing on a stubborn hangnail whilst furiously studying a sketch Harvey had hammered out in less than a night. It's of them, his friends, dead-eyed in a cornfield like _American Gothic_ , the inevitable Greendale remix.

"This is a good likeness," Nick tells him, fingertips tracing the curve of Sabrina's jaw, and following back up Theo's throat. "You're quite the talented little mortal, aren't you?" 

He says it with an off-putting and ill placed gravitas and still, Harvey almost preens for the compliment.

"It's not my best work," he says instead, head ducked so Nick can't see the embarassingly keen way his cheeks have pinked. Harvey knows he's good at this, if nothing else. Capturing a moment and pressing it into the paper, immortalised and yet just as fickle and fragile as ever - and yet watching someone dissect his art kind of makes him feel like he's awake during surgery.

He riffles through the loose sheets of paper, leaving smudgy fingerprints all along the edges, until Nick stills his hands with his own too-warm palm, solid but not work-worn the way his own have become.

"Let me see that one," he says, brushing the edge of a portrait of Sabrina, grinning wildly and haloed by the moon.

Harvey lets him take it, the flippant brush of their fingers still kind of burning through his hand, which he begins to tap arrhythmically against thigh just for somewhere to put it. "I drew that one after she took me on a walk through the woods. She kept tilting her head up towards the sky, talking about how at home she felt, even though it was so vast and wild. Or I guess, because of those things."

Nick's eyes crinkle at the edges when he looks over at Harvey again, something Harvey does not remember noticing about him, or any guy, before. Proximity explains it well enough - besides Theo, when has any guy ever been so at home in Harvey's carefully constructed personal space? His fingertips drum harder, like that might blunt the compulsion in him to grab for a pencil and start trying to pin Nick down.

"You got a good eye," Nick says, fingertips dancing across the shading of her hair. "Though I'm not sure the light would hit quite like this."

"I drew it before," Harvey replies. "You know, before it changed."

"Ah," Nick says, his thumb curled against the place her headband resides. 

Harvey does not know how to interpret that sound, or the crease between Nick's eyebrows as he takes this Sabrina apart, so he decides not to. He takes back the rest of the pile and begins rifling through again, looking for _something,_ and asks, "So, did we ever establish why you're here?"

Nick shrugs and keeps peering at the portrait, as if something might change if he looks away. Harvey leans over his shoulder, looking for whatever it is Nick might be seeing there, this more delicate Sabrina, except her eyes and smile are not that at all.

" - but I'm pretty sure the last time I had the amethyst pendulum was in here, this will only take a second." 

Harvey knows this one - speak of the devil's daughter and she will appear in the doorway, a red cape around her shoulders, Harvey's girlfriend at her side. 

The sketches fall from between Harvey's fingers, slipping away like the floor might, like the warmth radiating from Nick can't help but do as he reels out of the other boy's space.

*

"Sabrina!" Harvey exclaims, at the same time Sabrina says, "Nick?" Roz manages a soft, " _Harvey,_ " and Nick, smile playing on the edge of his features, slaps a hand down on Harvey's shoulder and asks, "So it's not Harry, then?"

Sabrina growls Nick's name again, voice a low note of warning. 

"Yes, Sabrina?" The look on his face makes her blood boil, just a little, like compensation for the dimmed affection. She steps forward ready to - she hardly knows what, when Roz throws her hands into the air, the buzzy striplights flickering. 

" _Okay_ ," Roz says, and Sabrina can see her jaw twitch in time with the stuttering lights. "Fun as it is reenacting Rocky Horror scenes, I have not slept and am incredibly stressed so can we _please_ all just sit down?"

Harvey stares at her, mouth slack, shoulders tensing. "Roz, you're -" 

Sabrina, catching his gaze, wraps her arms around Roz's and leads them all to the sofas. The lights make a low, ominous hum, a dim glow covering them all. "Come on," she says to the boys, eyes still bouncing between them. "Let's do as the lady says."

Harvey stumbles his way down, but Nick's hand is still a solid weight on his shoulder, pressing back when he sways. Sabrina notices, even if Harvey is too indisposed to, and Nick winks at her for her trouble but doesn't say a thing. 

"So," Roz says, her arms slumping to her knees. "You know that ritual to Hecate all the women did, to get the coven's powers back?" The boys nod a beat out of unison. "Since then, something is different with the cunning. Or I guess, _I'm_ different. I think I might, I don't know, have some kind of… power?"

Harvey kind of sways, pulled forward and repelled at once. He pushes the hair back from his face and shuts his eyes, and Sabrina doesn't know whether to feel upset or just worn out. "Are you… a witch now, too?"

"No!" Roz says. "I mean. I don't know?"

Sabrina covers Roz's hands with her own, again, slotting their fingers together and squeezing. "Roz is more like Mambo Marie than like me, we think? We have a lot to research and we should probably talk more with her and Ambrose. If Prudence - Anyway. Not important. What matters is that we're here for Roz, right?" She squeezes again, tries to push something like calm into Roz's skin.

Nick cuts through the quiet with a sharp, loud clap. "Congratulations Miss Walker, welcome to the magic club." He flashes his teeth at both the girls for a moment, then turns to Harvey, and Sabrina can feel the prickle of malcontent before he opens his mouth. "You sure know how to pick 'em, Harry. Powerful girls who can push you around, huh? Can't say I don't empathise."

"Don't start with me." Harvey mutters darkly.

Nick, seemingly unable to help himself, only smiles wider. "But I was paying you a compliment."

Harvey rounds on him, his hands balled together in his lap, knuckles sharply white. "Can you stop talking for five minutes so I don't wanna break your jaw?"

" _Enough_!" Roz’s voice cracks through the room like lightning. "This macho posturing bullshit is _not_ a cute look, it's actually pretty damn infantile and also _this is_ _about me_ , not you guys. Can you just let me - " She scrubs a hand over her eyes, and Sabrina runs a warm hand along her back, soothing the dark thing she knows is there, the way frustration roils around a witch's insides, building momentum until it can roar its way out. Roz gives her an almost smile. "Let me get my bearings."

"Okay," Sabrina says, gently tipping Roz's head into her shoulder, still rubbing soft circles on the other girl's back. Her nails catch in the ribbed fabric, pulling and then smoothing the lines away. "That's our grand revelation out of the way. Do you guys want to tell us what the heaven it is you're doing here?"

Harvey opens his mouth, but Nick cuts him off by flinging an arm around his shoulder and pulling him in tight. Sabrina watches the way Harvey stiffens just slightly. The way Nick's body relaxes to make space for him.

"Harry and I have decided to be new best buds, isn't that right?" Nick's wearing his most insufferable of shit-eating grins, the one he used to save for biting remarks about the sisters as they flitted past at lunch.

Harvey sits up but makes no move to shrug Nick off. "I found him rifling through our things when I came to pick up my guitar."

Sabrina exhales through her nose and tries again. "Nick?"

He runs the hand not cupping Harvey's shoulder through his hair and takes a breath. "Look, I woke up here. I had been having a heart to heart with our dear Prudence at the Academy and she whisked me away to some elsewhere. Elsewhere happening to be this terrible couch." 

"But why here?" She narrows her eyes at him, hopes he reads scrutiny into them, and not the little tug of resentment that he didn't come to her. 

He smiles again, a flippant thing. It does not reach his eyes. "Well, if the academy is out, where is there? Let's see. The Spellman house, Dorian's place and Hell are the only places I have spent any meaningful amount of time lately, and excuse me if I'm not ready to revisit them quite yet. Perhaps this garage is my no-mans-land. My limbo, if you will."

"He did come here to help us," Roz says, quietly, into the curtain of Sabrina's hair. 

"Well," Nick says, drawing attention back like a magnet. "I couldn't in good conscience let my man Harry here be a virgin sacrifice, now, could I?"

He leers as he says it, presses harder into Harvey. 

Harvey finally smacks him away. "I know you know my name is Harvey."

Undeterred, Nick leans back and let his fingers play gently with the shaggy ends of Harvey's hair. "But Harry is so becoming on you." 

Harvey elbows him lightly, but there's an ease to it. "You're an ass."

Something dark curls in Sabrina's stomach, pressing firmly against the dulled sensation the candle ritual had left behind. The knowledge of the feelings is still there, a stubborn sense-memory, the numbness like a shroud over the top of it all. 

"So what now?" Roz asks, sitting up and glancing between them all, gaze settling on Harvey. "What happens now?"

*

They agree between them that Roz should spend the night at Sabrina's, getting to grips with what's happening to her. That is to say that Roz steers them to that conclusion, not even wanting her mind to settle too long on Harvey in case she's bombarded by another thing she can't handle seeing. 

Nick, begging without quite admitting to it, to not be left to his own devices, suggests that if they're having a girls' night that the boys should get one, too. Sabrina moves to protest, stiffening beside her, but Roz chimes in first. "It's always good to have someone with magic around, in case anything bad intentioned shows up, right? Plus Harvey needs protecting from Theo and Robin's PDA."

She's not sure why she says it. Maybe because when Sabrina was indisposed, Nick had still come running to save them. Maybe because she's always been a sucker for a cute boy with sad eyes. 

He smiles at her, and she feels it, that little fissure of excitement of having his eyes turned towards her, and she almost thinks she gets why Sabrina would go to hell for him. But then, it could just be that spark that's growing somewhere inside her, that knowing flicker of like recognising like.

Theo's voice on the phone is bright with excitement, a contrast to the gruff resignation of Harvey's and that's funny, kind of, but Roz wouldn't dare laugh. The light cuts through his hair and paints him gray-scale, and with the way he's hunched over it makes him look only half tangible. Still, when Nick punches him on the arm he doesn't give. Harvey is solid as he's ever been. 

"Did you find your crystal point?" Roz asks Sabrina, feeling like Bugs Bunny, frantically painting an EXIT sign above his own head. 

Sabrina feels around the chipped up coffee table Roz and Harvey had hauled in whilst Theo offered the most helpful of moral support as Harvey gathers up the pile of sketches he and Nick had let clatter to the floor. She catches herself in there, from her glasses days, looking more like a doppleganger than an exact likeness. 

When Sabrina says "Got it!" Roz almost swoons in relief.

"You guys think you can manage not to kill each other if we leave?" Sabrina asks, eyes narrowed again.

"Sabrina," Nick says, voice turned soft again. "You have nothing to worry about." 

Roz catches the look on Sabrina's face and tugs on her arm before anything can come of it.

The rest of the day is lost in the whirlwind of books and tomes Zelda heaps on the Spellman kitchen table, positively giddy that something is actually forcing Sabrina to hunker down, even if the girl in question is only ever on the knife’s edge of consciousness as she pours through the books. 

Ambrose pops in and out, correcting Sabrina's pronunciation, and informing them what rites certainly do _not_ work as advertised, and Roz kind of wants to grab his arm and dive into his brain, collecting the decades of knowledge amassed in exile. It would be quicker than the books, at least. Not that she's complaining - Roz lives and dies by a well planned study sesh, she even stopped off at home to grab an unused binder to keep track of everything. But she can't help be tugged by her own untapped potential, and every time Ambrose passes through, his eyes looking beyond what's in front of them, her sternum pulls a bit harder.

Sabrina sets her up beside her on the bed, a lamp for reading, a glass of water, extra blankets in case she gets cold. It's cosy, and almost normal, almost like they haven't changed irrevocably since they last had a slumber party. They could be fifteen again, unbothered by power and destiny and concepts as vast as the expanding universe.

Roz curls up in the bed beside Sabrina, watching the other girl's emotions wander across her face. Her dark eyebrows knit and rise, her mouth screws up into a sharp little bud then relaxes again. Roz is not sure she's ever thought so hard in her life. 

"Sabrina," she says, snapping the girl out of her little trance. "Since this is like, basically a sleepover… Can we talk?"

"Of course we can. Oh my false God, Roz, this must be so overwhelming, I didn't even _think_ ." She perks just a bit, leaning in like they're girls again, sharing some incredible secret. They should be torch-lit, under the covers. "Magic… it can be scary, intimidating, _terrifying_ even, when you're just getting to grips with it, but it's. Roz. It's the most amazing thing in the world to feel _powerful -"_

"No, Sabrina." Roz stills her with her hands, drawing patterns above Sabrina's legs on the sheets. "I meant about us. About our friendship. About… Harvey."

Sabrina nods, her mouth opening slightly, like there is something she wants to say but it can't quite get past her teeth. She's sagging, too, tiredness starting to droop her eyes, so this has to be quick.

Roz takes a deep breath. "I love Harvey. I think I've always been a bit in love with Harvey - he's the guy, you know, the one stable point in the universe. The guy who always stood up for me."

Sabrina nods again. Of course she does. 

"But this -" Roz's fingers knot in the sheets. "This magic, this... whatever this is. It feels so much bigger than our little highschool lives. _I_ feel so much bigger." 

When she looks up Sabrina is beaming at her, the lamplight giving her bone white hair an extra touch of the spectral where it fans against the pillow, her face turned to the side, her cheekbone a sharp point in the dark. “I know exactly what you mean.”

"I love Harvey," Roz repeats, mostly to herself. "I don't think I know what life is like _not_ being in love with Harvey. But I think I need to find out where my edges are before I can think about being contained. Is that _awful_? Am I awful, Sabrina?"

When she looks across the bedspread, though, Sabrina is slumped back against the pillow and headlong into sleep. 

Roz isn't sure all the magic in the world could knock her out tonight, buzzing with untapped potential and uncoalesced thoughts. She pulls the sheets up under Sabrina's chin then tiptoes downstairs in search of something to soothe her nerves if nothing else.

The fridge is not particularly enlightening. It's full of unmarked jars of questionable liquids, ranging from milky greys to nauseating maroons. Resigned to wakefulness, she slams it shut and finds herself whirling right into the tip of Ambrose's sword.

"Rosalind!" He grins and flicks his fingers at her, sealing up her sharp inhale before it becomes a shriek. "Just the woman for the job." 

He lowers the sword and clears his throat, which seems to undo the clamp around Roz's own voice. "What the hell are you doing?" 

He holds the sword out to her, just like the one Prudence had lent her in the pagan battle, the one Roz had used to slice straight through Nagaina's throat. There's a giddiness lighting up Ambrose's eyes. “I have a proposal.”

_It must be catching_ , she thinks, because she smiles and replies, "What exactly did you have in mind?"

*

"So," Harvey says, curled up into a protective little ball on the far side of the couch, nursing a warm beer which he grimaces at every time he takes a sip. "How did I get stuck with you again?" 

Nick quirks an eyebrow at him and drains his own drink. "Did you want to be the filling in the Theo-Robin sandwich over there?" He nods to where the other boys are collapsed into one another, hands and legs entangled. Nick tilts his head at Harvey, because he can. "Not that I would be opposed to seeing that."

"Harvey is not invited to this party," Theo pipes up, twisting around Robin to grin at them both. "But Nick, you're welcome if you ask nicely."

"Do I get a say?" Robin asks, ruffling Theo's hair with his breath. 

"Do you say 'no'?" 

"I mean…"

"Hey guys?" Harvey rounds his shoulders, curls up even tighter into himself. "Can we all stop flirting and watch the movie?"

Nick turns back to Theo. "Is he always this much of a spoilsport?"

Theo sits up somewhat on Robin's lap and laughs. "Normally I'm throwing sugar packets at him to make him _stop_ sucking faces with my friends."

The boy's cheeks flush a charming pink and honestly, Nick might have lost interest in bothering him by now if he didn't fluster so endearingly. "You're holding out on me, Harry."

Harvey narrows his eyes and finishes his beer, reaching for another. "Note that he said friends."

Nick clutches his chest. "You _wound_ me." He turns back to the old TV, the picture is mostly stable but the speakers emit a high pitched whine that pierces through you until you learn to filter it out. "So is this what mortals do for fun then? Movie nights?"

"Sorry we can't be as exciting as the woodland orgies you're used to." Harvey tries to affect a bored tone, but Nick can see how tense he is. The music from the movie has taken a turn for the suspenseful, and there's more than just spite making him curl up on himself.

On the far side of the room, Nick makes out Robin's quiet _woodland orgies?_ And the giggling whisper of Theo's response, but his eyes are trained on Harvey. The muscles in his neck knotting and tensed, the way his blunt fingernails bite back into his skin. 

"Hey," he leans forward, voice hardly above a whisper. "Are you okay?"

Harvey doesn't turn his head. "I've had enough of zombies." 

"You wanna change it? We don't have to -"

"Can you just leave me alone?" Harvey does look at him, then, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth a sharp line.

"I'm sorry," Nick says. "I wasn't trying to…" He purses his lips and takes a short breath. "You wanna get even? Put on a werewolf one. I'll cry like an infant."

He touches Harvey's shoulder again, leans a little more into his space. "I'm not trying to usurp your territory, you know. I just don't have a lot of people clamouring to hang around with me right now. I thought it might be nice to play-act it for a while."

Harvey is still staring at him, chewing on his own lip, not pushing him away. This expression crosses his face for a moment, one Nick can't quite read, and then he laughs. "God, you had me going there for a second." He slaps his own hand down on top of Nick's, then reaches for his drink. "If you don't stop being nice to me I might be forced to get suspicious."

Nick smiles back, and refuses the urge to curl up into the boy's side. _Mortals_ , he thinks. _Always rationing physical affection like it might run out._

He likes a warm body to lay his head down on, what can he say? 

*

Sabrina wakes up to an empty bed and the smell of sulfur curling up the walls. She can’t quite catch the end of her conversation with Roz, something about being bigger than yourself, something about Harvey, like a port in a storm. Something about Sabrina being so tired she could probably sleep for another week and not feel refreshed.

She can't quite quell the feeling that if she balls her fists the walls might crack. Reigning in hell will do that to a girl. It's a constant buzz, a hum of energy that says _I'm the opposite of Divine. I could fell your empire._

She's taken to gracing everything with the lightest possible touch. 

If she sleeps enough, maybe the thing that pulses in her blood might rest, too.

When she makes it downstairs, Hilda is frantically baking lemon and poppyseed muffins to cover up the smell of whatever it is Roz and Ambrose are crowded around on the kitchen table. 

"Good morning?" 

Roz looks up from the cauldron she's sprinkling sage into and smiles. "Hey Sabrina." Her hair is still tucked into a bandana, and Ambrose's silk dressing gown is thrown over her shoulders. "How did you sleep?"

"Morning love," Hilda throws over her shoulder, pulling another steaming tray from the oven. 

"I slept okay." She says carefully, edging around the table. "Have you slept _at all_?"

Ambrose scribbles something furiously down in a notebook with far more drama than it can possibly warrant. "I'm afraid Roz and I have been somewhat indisposed."

"I can see that." Sabrina leans forward, trying to peer into the dark thing bubbling on the table. "Doing what, exactly?"

Roz's eyes are alight. "We think I might be able to use the cunning to get eyes on Prudence through her sword. We're just setting up some insurance first, making a protection potion to make sure neither of us can get hurt during it." 

"Isn't that a little dangerous?" Sabrina ventures forward, watching how Ambrose pours salt in a sigil into the potion, Roz and Prudence's initials entwined. 

Ambrose laughs. "Coming from you, cousin, that's practically a compliment."

And well, okay, he's got her there. 

She steals one of the still warm muffins from the cooling rack and presses into Roz's side. "I was gonna go check on the boys and make sure no one's been massacred in fright club HQ, if you wanted to come with?" 

Roz hardly looks up. "Thanks, 'Brina, but I really feel like we're onto something here. Like I might be able to _do_ something."

Sabrina thinks she remembers something about Roz, something about finding her own edges, but she can't quite make the fragment whole. She shrugs. "I guess I'll be cleaning up the blood by myself, then."

  
  


*

To say Harvey does not expect to wake up to Nick drooling against his collarbone, his own neck screaming its displeasure at the angle he'd collapsed in, would be something of an understatement. Nick's hands are pressed close beside his ribs, his breath fanning warmly against Harvey's throat. 

It takes him a moment - the cool dark and the warm body holding him down so easy to slip back into, a kind of comfort he's not used to but could definitely become accustomed to. He takes that moment, warm, held, and then allows the illusion to promptly shatter. Harvey snaps up, wrenching his abused neck and jolting Nick where he's still decidedly passed out. Robin and Theo are apparently long gone, no sound in the room but Nick's breath and Harvey's speeding heart and the couch creaking beneath them both.

"Hey," he groans, shaking Nick by the shoulders. "Get up."

He regrets it, a little, the moment he does it. Nick is lax in sleep - there's a tension Harvey has not looked close enough to notice about Nick, but seeing him without it is a bit of a trip. As soon as his eyes open, Nick's posture changes, sprawled as it is across Harvey's body, his shoulders broaden, his mouth in a lightly downturned pout. His hands tighten around Harvey's chest, fingers pressing into the bumps of Harvey's ribs, and his dark eyes blink up at him.

" _Farm-boy_ ," Nick says, almost warmly, voice rough with sleep. "Is this my dream or your nightmare?"

"Neither, shut up." Harvey wriggles until he's closer to comfortable, his back held by the laboured arm of the couch, and Nick makes no move to do the same.

"I see the lovers abandoned us." Nick pillows his chin on his hands, the sharp points of his hips digging into Harvey's thighs. 

Harvey's mouth feels like sandpaper, the beer bitter on his breath. "Traitors."

"Does that mean we're on clean up duty?" Nick yawns, tipping onto his side and pulling down his black shirt where it's ridden up, and Harvey pointedly does not notice.

"Can't you just, like, magic things in order?" He feels awkward in himself, kind of lumbering and out of place even in what is ostensibly his own space, even when Nick is the interloper. Something about that affected ease just makes Harvey want to curl up and squirm. 

Nick laughs and pulls himself up, their legs still pressed close. His hair is mussed with sleep, curled and haphazard. For a moment he almost looks like the devil. "And here I thought farm-folk were proud workers. You put your kind to shame, Kinkle."

"Oh, the surname you can get right, huh?" When he moves, the sharp threat of headache pulls in Harvey's skull. "How about hangover spells?"

Nick laughs, strangely unguarded, and for a second Harvey feels like he doesn't recognise him at all. "I think that's more Ambrose's jurisdiction. I prefer to wallow in it." 

"You're a goddamn martyr, Scratch." It's been a day, just about, hardly enough to make an impression, and certainly not enough to lower Harvey's defenses. And yet, something about Nick, divorced of his own contexts leaves Harvey feeling entirely disarmed.

"I'll drink to that," Nick says, procuring two glasses of water with a flick of his wrist and handing one to Harvey.

He sniffs it before he drinks it, because he's not _that_ trusting, and Nick laughs again, screwing up his face in mockery. 

He won't admit it, but the water feels blessedly cool on his throat.

*

In between putting up wards and making preparations, Ambrose had been steadily building her a pile of books on mysticism and prophecy. The top one is calfskin leather-bound, embossed with gold, and he traces it with a fingernail before winking at Roz. 

"Straight from the bowels of the Vatican, that one" he tells her. "It's a treatise on the Nazarene's apostle's divination and the practice's roots in the divine."

When he smiles at her she can't help but grin back. Put it down to the lack of sleep, or the way Ambrose says everything like it's a promise of something wild and illicit in the near future, but it feels like something brighter, like she's picking up on something. Like she's him, amplified.

Still, even through the contact-high, a cold flush of fear keeps pulsing through her. When she checks her tally, Roz finds that she's touched her eyelids 72 times since they sat down at the table. Prior experience tells her it's hard not to feel like anything gained won't come with a harsher price.

"Everything alright, dear?" Ambrose touches the back of her hand, softly, as if to pull her out of the clouds and back into the smoke-filled kitchen.

This has the unfortunate effect of throwing Roz bodily into his mind.

Unlike the brief, linear snippets the cunning usually reveals, Roz is split apart, passing through a thousand moments and feelings all at once. She divides between the light and dark, stuttered instances of grief layered over one another, slipping against fragments of songs and poetry and film scenes like five dimensional six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Her senses are swallowed up in the stomach churning mix of fear and mayhem which smells like frankincense and gasoline, and feels like cold metal and tastes like Hilda's gingersnaps with a touch of bitter poison; Ambrose and dead lovers, Ambrose and Prudence, Ambrose and the devil whispering in his ear…

Roz slams back into her own mind at roughly the same moment Ambrose manages to catch her falling body.

"You were just in my head, weren't you?" 

Roz nods, trying to get her breathing regular.

"Ah," he says, helping her to her feet, expression grave. "In that case there might be more power in you than we first assumed."

*

Before she even gets to the doorway of the garage, Sabrina senses something off. It's the hush, maybe, or just the unsettling way the absent sensation is starting to feel like a weight in her stomach. She still holds the memories - Harvey's solid hands, Nick's reckless devotion - the lack of feeling can't erase the indisputable fact of them both. Walking into the room kind of feels like a first date. All of the dulled nerves are trying to reconnect.

She takes a second to steady her heartrate, her hand inches shy of the garage door when she hears Harvey's voice, turned much softer than she's been allowed to hear it for a while.

"- and even before Robin, Theo had, like, this weird talking to ghosts thing and Roz had the cunning and now there's whatever this is and it's like everyone else has this… potential. Something bigger, you know? And I'm working in a fucking _mine_."

She can hear Nick laugh softly from inside, and it makes her spine stiffen, like someone drawing their fingernails against the grain of her. 

"Wait, what's that song you and Theo played last night," Nick says, his voice a more solid thing. "The one that was like _You're so fucking special, I wish I was special…"_

"You're _still_ such an ass," Harvey replies, and he's laughing now, too. 

Sabrina feels faintly ill. She counts backwards from five, fingers on the rough, splintering wood of the door and makes the laughter and chatter of them dissolve into white noise.

On _one_ , she pushes forward and steps inside the garage, which reeks of beer and boy sweat and omnipresent damp. Harvey and Nick are close together on the couch, knees pressing against one another, and shifting as they speak.

She sees Nick's face, just before he spots her. It's unguarded, bright, something she's only seen on him in the briefest moments. Her insides twist in response.

"Okay," Sabrina says, voice like an alarm bell cutting through the calm. "Who are you and what have you done with Harvey and Nick?"

Harvey turns to face her, his smile soft and cracked right open. "'Brina, hey, are you okay?"

"Well, I thought so, but apparently I'm back in hell and it's frozen over because you and Nick aren't at each other's throats." She puts her hands on her hips, like that might hold the disparate parts of her together. And that should be funny, because the parts she thought were the most disparate are yucking it up like fast friends right in front of her. 

"Stranger things have happened, Spellman." Nick throws his arms over the back of the couch, spreading himself out, performing for her.

"They quite literally haven't." She bites. What else are sharp teeth good for? 

"'Brina, come on," Harvey leans over and grabs her hand, pulling her a few steps closer. His hands are rough, just like she remembers, passing over the healed skin of her own knuckles, blemishless by magic, roughened by Hell. "He's only a little insufferable."

She narrows her eyes and whirls on Nick. "What did you do to him?"

"We had a guys night. There was a little bit of a heart to heart. Is it really that unbelievable?" Nick really is the picture of contrite, his hair askew, his eyes still heavy with tiredness, his clothes rumpled and slept in. If she hadn't banished her feelings to the ether she might want to smooth him out, take her hands and mold him back into something she recognises. 

But she has. So she won't. "Yeah, kinda."

"Sabrina, I'm a big boy," Harvey says over the lip of his glass. "I can take care of myself."

"What's that you're drinking?" She yanks it out of his hand and squints at it, swirling it around the warm glass, clammy from his touch. 

"'Brina, come on, it's just water." Harvey's hand falls from her own, his body thrown back into the couch. But Sabrina is trained on Nick, again.

"Scorpio water?" She stands in front of him, crosses her arms, quirks her brow, finds the picture of surety so her insides might try to match. He meets her gaze and doesn't say a thing.

Harvey, on the other hand - "What the hell is Scorpio water?"

"It's water left in a bottle in view of the stars during Scorpio season." She tells him, without looking away from Nick. "It makes whoever drinks it extra trusting and vulnerable, like the frog in the story of the frog and the scorpion. Apt, because in that fable, the scorpion sabotages the frog and signs his own death warrant as he does it." 

Harvey almost scoffs. "Seriously? That's ridiculous."

Nick presses his face into his hands and sighs. "Okay, hear me out -" 

Harvey throws his head back into the couch and laughs, something dark and mean and furious. "You have got to be fucking kidding me."

"Listen, Kinkle," Nick rocks forward on the couch and tries to catch him, but barely manages to brush the fuzzy edge of his flannel before Harvey pulls away. "You were tense and I felt awkward, I was just trying to make things that bit easier. I was drinking it, too."

Harvey scowls at him and pulls himself to his feet. He might be the only mortal in the room, but he towers over the two of them. "When will you people get it in your heads that I am not okay with you rewriting my life?" As he pulls on his jacket he knocks into the small tower of beer cans piled beside the couch, spilling them across the concrete floor. "I am not your goddamn plaything." 

Sabrina's stomach tightens again, watching him storm out, the empty expression she remembers from the Tommy incident flooding back like a relapse.

He closes the door softly behind him, but that might be worse than if he'd just slammed it. She doesn't let herself flinch.

It's easier to lock onto Nick, to square up to him as he stands and let words cross her tongue before her mind has time to stop her.

"You," she says, poking his sternum and pressing hard. "I don't know what you're doing here, I don't know if you're trying to hurt me because you're still upset or what, but I am _not okay_ with you taking it out on my friends." 

The tense feeling in her belly is rapidly fraying, something that isn't quite anger but that fills the same void pulling roughly at the threads.

"Sabrina, that's not - "

"What _I_ know is that yesterday Harvey and I were good and after spending literally one evening with you he is storming off with murder eyes." There's a sharp pull somewhere inside her. 

A snap.

"Sabrina -" 

" _What?"_

"Your hands are on fire."

Oh.

When she looks down her hands are smothered in flames, flickering and deadly and a cold, haunting blue. "Unholy crap."

"Is that," Nick moves closer, lifting her wrist and bringing it up to eye level in cautious wonder. The cold light catches the angles of his face, chiaroscuro marking him something divine. "Is this hellfire?"

She can't stop looking at her hands, lost in the way her frustration has unfurled into flame. "I don't know."

"Sabrina." He says her name slowly, softly, like it's something best handled with care. "Are you still queen of hell?"

" _No!"_ She catches his eyes, lit up with a shifting fear and awe, like he can see what she is - she's lighting him up. She could burn him away. "I mean… mostly no."

Nick's jaw sets, the shape of his skull like marble under the flames. "After everything we all _just_ went through -"

"It's not _like_ that," she says, the nerves growing again, the flames glowing brighter. "Nick, please, I can explain. It's not _me,_ I'm here, okay, I just wanted to be myself again, and I couldn't see how else to get out of it."

She can feel the threat of tears, and it _is_ a threat - she doesn't know what will come out of her if she lets another thing loose. 

He looks at her with his dark eyes, half furious and half something she does not want to name. "And what exactly _are_ you?"

"Don't you _dare_ ," she says, something dark curling through her voice, and even she shrinks back from it, the flame dimming, her hands beginning to shake. "Nick, I don't think I'm in control of this." 

"Okay," he says, his eyes squeezed shut, his body loosening. "It's okay, we just need to calm you down, okay? You're gonna be fine." His fingers tighten around her wrist. "What do you need me to do?"

This is the Nick she knows, the one always ready to throw himself into the path of her destruction.

The answer should be get her aunts, or at the very least, get Ambrose. Instead she says, "Get Harvey. We're fixing this."

He bristles for a moment, fingers slipping looser around her wrist, but he nods and pulls himself in an inch closer, careful to avoid her burning touch, and kisses her cheek. It's a brief thing, a barely there press of his soft mouth, but it settles somewhere within her between the fear and the power high, and Sabrina feels like she warms all over.

"I'll be fast," he promises her. "We'll set you right again, Spellman."

He is gone before the sentence settles, and Sabrina is alone in the garage, a girl on fire.

*

"I'm sure I don't need to explain empathy to a preacher's daughter," Ambrose says, pouring two strong coffees into the deep, heavy mugs he pulled from the back of one of the mahogany cupboards, behind the ancient and delicate china that Roz is constantly afraid of chipping.

"Yeah I'm pretty familiar," she takes the mug, the sharp bitter scent welcome after the sour tang they've spent the night cultivating. 

"Still," he throws himself sideways into a chair, chin resting on the back of it, "You have a somewhat more literal version than most." 

She watches the steam rise from the cup, curling into restless shapes, like apparitions crying out for mercy. "Go on."

"Well," he says, digging through one of the books he laid out for her, an errant breath away from toppling the tower. "As you said yourself, you're no longer simply viewing visions but living through them." He scans the book with a calloused finger, and Roz has to watch him, has to focus to keep her head from spinning. "Have you noticed anything else strange lately, say, feeling emotions that don't feel like they belong to you?"

She thinks back to the garage, when the boys started yelling, feeling like if someone said another word she'd promptly blow up the lightbulb. "I think maybe I have."

"Well I have a theory that not only can you pick up on other's feelings or, dare I say it, their will, but that you can amplify them." Ambrose closes the book and stares into his coffee. "That is to say, if magic is the sun, then you are the magnifying glass that sets the ground afire." 

Roz blinks a couple of times, steam blurring her vision. "That sounds…"

"Petrifying?"

"Fucking _awesome_." Roz laughs over her coffee as Ambrose splutters on his. 

"Yes, well, that too I suppose." He mops himself up with absolute decorum.

"What does this mean for getting eyes on Prudence?" She nods to the cauldron, almost cool now, the protection potion bottled and ready for use. "If you're channeling through me, I might be able to speak to her, see through her eyes. I might even be able to use the cunning to warn her about what's on the way." 

Maybe she has a taste for it, shocking him, because once again, Ambrose almost gags. "Rosalind, that would be exponentially more dangerous and not to mention untested. I couldn't ask you to put yourself under so much fire, not when we don't even know your limitations."

He says all of this, eyes frantic, hands shaking, but Roz knows her gut. He just told her she was an empath, did he not think she'd sense the sharp point of hope running him clean through? 

"Try me," she says, throwing and catching one of the dark brown medicine bottles between her hands. "I'm in a dangerous kinda mood."

*

Harvey has called Roz five times since collapsing onto his bed, each time ringing straight through. It doesn't seem like a lot, even in tandem with the six texts, but if he hears the atonal beep of her voicemail again he might scream.

He remembers this from being with Sabrina, being loved in person but an afterthought in absence, magic swallowing up time and focus and Harvey left on the outside, pressed up against the glass. He drew a lot more back then. All that time on his hands, and all.

He tries to do it now, to just absently doodle something so his hands have something to do, but forcing things has never produced much for him. He remembers when he was a kid and Tommy would let him crawl out of bed and curl up on the couch when their father was passed out in the bathroom, and even though he was too young to quite understand it they'd watch _Heroes,_ whilst eating corn nuts and downing diluted root beer so the sugar wouldn't keep him up all night. It's part of why he loves to draw - he got hooked on the concept of being possessed by it, the tug in his fingers, making something that could guide the way for someone else. 

He's been drawing a lot of hands, lately. Laced together or wringing in anxiety, pressing flat or curled into a fist. There's a philosophy in that, he's sure - the product reflecting the tool that made it. Roz would have a name for it. He tries not to dial again.

"A bit rougher than what you showed me yesterday, but still not bad." Nick is standing in Harvey's bedroom, sketchbook from the desk in his hand. 

It takes a lot of restraint to not pelt him with pencils."Why is it that the one person I actually want to talk to is so wrapped up in witchcraft she's too busy to text me back, but you I can't get to leave me alone?"

Nick drops the sketchbook and says, "Sabrina is in trouble."

And god help him, Harvey is already on his feet.

He still can't quite wrap his head around the novelty of magic, of appearing and disappearing at will, but it feels especially surreal when Nick grabs him by the forearm, warm and solid and suddenly Harvey is yanked out of his childhood bedroom and instead back in the din of the garage he's only just run from, face to face with a Sabrina who is burning at the edges.

"Oh my god," his whole body feels like it's shaking, looking at her. There are tears down her cheeks. Her hands are engulfed in flames.

"Harvey," she says, so softly he can barely hear it over the crackling of the fire.

He turns to Nick, his hand still white-knuckled around Harvey's bicep. "What am I supposed to do to help here?"

Nick's voice is almost as delicate as Sabrina's when he drops his hand and steps closer to her. "She asked for you. I just delivered."

"Sabrina," Harvey moves just a touch closer, trying to avoid her hands where they splay out beside her. "Hey, what's wrong, 'Brina? What do we have to do?"

"Think I'm in trouble, Harv." He thought she was quivering, at first, but the closer he gets the more he sees of it. Her edges are insubstantial. Blurring. "But you told me you'd catch me, yeah?"

"Course I will." He wipes away the tear trailing down her cheek, the roughness of his fingers catching on where she's soft and barely solid. "What happened?"

"Things have been a bit… unstable, since hell." She says. "I feel powerful, but also like I might crack down the middle."

"And who knows what might come spilling out." Nick says beside them, looking about as helpless as Harvey feels.

The flames are starting to make him sweat, but he won't step back unless she asks him to. "We won't let you, okay?"

"I think it's my emotions." She tells him. "I got mad and. Well. Fire." 

"Well, we're all cool now, right? Nick?" Harvey nods. Smiles without his jaw shaking even a little. 

Nick shifts beside him, shoulders brushing. "As ice," he says, flashing his teeth at the both of them.

Sabrina nods, "Okay." She wilts a little, bowing beneath her own weight, the flames dimming so they barely reach past her fingertips. "I'm so tired."

Nick strokes her hair back from her ear and whispers something Harvey can't make out, his fingers so pronounced against the paleness of her. Hardly a beat passes before Sabrina is slumping forward, her eyes closed, her hands only slightly warm to the touch. 

Harvey catches her, just like he promised.

"What did you do?" He hisses to Nick above her head as they both lift her onto the couch. 

"Just a small sleep spell. It'll give her some time to recuperate, maybe wrest back control. Nothing dangerous, I promise." He kneels beside her, fussing with her hair until it's smooth under his fingertips.

Harvey bites his tongue. He wants to say _what makes you the judge of that?_ Wants to take it out on him, a little. _We never had these kinds of problems before you arrived_.

The voice of Roz in his head says _correlation is not causation_ , and he almost laughs, again, or screams, or does something more than shift his weight from foot to foot. "What do we do now?" 

Nick turns to him, his expression unreadable. "We wait for her to tell us what happened in hell."

  
  


*

There's this moment when Roz brings the bottle to her mouth, the acrid smell, the tingling of salt on her lips where she thinks _I've made a huge mistake._

She's been awake for almost 40 hours now, has cycled through about twelve different lives in that time, and now she's going to run head first into the kind of danger that would have her dad kicking her to the curb and crying out for her mortal soul for even considering.

She's choked it down before the thought has time to germinate.

Ambrose is waiting for her, one hand outstretched, the sword resting on the table between them, his other hand curled around the handle. "Are you ready?" 

"There's only one way to find out." She takes a breath and closes the circle, one hand on the blade, the other clutching Ambrose's.

Then the floor promptly drops out from underneath her.

Gone is the Spellman dining area, all dark wood and trinkets, and in its place unfolds a lush green woodland, streaked in morning sun.

_Where is this?_ Roz thinks, feeling her head begin to spin. Her feet are firmly planted in the earth, solid and sure - but then, they aren't exactly her feet.

"Who goes there?" Prudence hisses, glancing around for any sign of life between herself and the stretching trees.

_Prudence_ , Roz thinks, softly. _I'm Roz, Sabrina's friend. The one with the visions. I'm here to help you._

Prudence makes a dark sound that might be a laugh, but Roz can't begin to unravel it.

_And I should just trust you, should I? Place my life in your mortal little hands? How are you here?_ Her voice shifts to something internal, curling around Roz as she takes up space within the other girl's head. 

_Ambrose is helping me_ , she tells her, feeling this kind of constriction around her, the window of her vision shrinking at the edges.

_Of course_ . She knows it's laughter this time. _Well, I'm sorry little seer, but this line is for my sisters only. Find someone else to help._

The grows tighter around Roz, the greenery shrinking in scope. Prudence is shutting her out.

But she doesn't know Roz, hasn't felt the wrath of a girl dressed in mix and match Pam Grier offcasts filibustering in sex ed class about misconceptions about the female orgasm. Digging her heels in is second nature, and Roz barely struggles to hold herself down.

_Look, Prudence, I am only barely in control of this thing and I've put myself at risk for you, so you're gonna suck it up and listen._ The light starts to widen, close out the dark. Roz feels herself smile, even if she has no tangible body to do it with. _I'm psychic, Prudence, if I can find a way to see what you're up against we can beat him. Or at least keep you alive long enough to put up a fight._

She feels Prudence breathe deeply, the clean, fresh air flooding into both of their lungs. _You think you can handle my father, little Cassandra_?

If she smiled before, she's grinning now. _I beheaded that snake bitch. I'm down to tackle a little eldritch horror._

_Well then,_ Prudence thinks, her hand twisting on the hilt of her sword. _Call it an alliance. Come back soon._

When Roz comes back to her body she is thrumming with adrenaline, Ambrose's hand white-knuckled around hers. 

"Did it work?" He asks, carefully extracting himself from her and flattening his palms against the table.

"Prudence is in." She's smiling so wide her jaw aches from it.

*

  
  


Nick can't get past the image of Sabrina burning in front of him in the garage, creating her own light between her hands and covering him in it - _Morningstar._

It's what she is, undeniably. 

It's what she's made from - the brightest of holy lights turned the fire that burns away the dark. It terrifies him. 

Worse - it inspires devotion. 

He looks at her, curled up so small on the couch she seems hardly substantial at all, her expression lax and dreamless and yet he cannot get past the thought - he's the kindling, and Sabrina will be the fire.

"Hey," Harvey says, his hand almost brushing Nick's shoulder. "Come here, I wanna talk."

He leads them both to the smaller couch, one they barely fit on, especially since Harvey seems to be trying to press as much distance between them as possible. He looks like this has been the longest day of his life, and Nick knows enough about this kid to know that's saying something.

"I'm all ears, Kinkle. Say your piece." 

Sabrina shifts slightly, making this half-sound at the back of her throat, not a sigh but not a breath, either. It makes Nick rock forward in his seat. Then she relaxes again, still dead to the world.

"Listen," Harvey says to him, both of them fixated on the sleeping girl in front of them. "We don't know each other that well and frankly I'm predisposed to hating your guts."

Nick laughs at that, which might be the wrong thing to do, because Havrey inches that little bit further away. 

"I don't know what you're doing, if you're just messing with my head or what - I know Sabrina and Prudence did that to the jocks, and if you're trying that shit with me, it needs to stop." Harvey turns to him, his gaze burning it's way through Nick's skull. "I'm not playing with you, Nick."

Nick smiles at him, "I'm not playing with you either, Kinkle. I wanted a friend, and you were the best I could do on short notice. Turns out you're kinda fun when you're not my mortal enemy."

Harvey frowns. "Mortal. Funny." He stretches out, his spine clicking as he puffs out his chest, his shoulders broadening beneath his flannel and t-shirt, and Nick can't help but follow the ripple of movement. "And what about all the ruffling my hair and calling me handsome?"

It's a task to not laugh again. The boy truly has no idea what he is. "That's just called having _eyes_ , prettyboy. Who could blame me?"

"Nick, I'm serious." His shoulders hunch, again, like it's just the pull of gravity.

" _Harvey_ , so am I." Nick has to lean forward, far enough that their noses brush, their breath mingling. He holds himself there for just a moment, letting the kid stew in the proximity and shared body heat. It's something of a surprise when Harvey bridges the gap.

His mouth is warm and pliant against Nick's, tentative for a moment until Nick kisses back, and then the boy unravels. His mouth presses urgently against Nick's, his teeth a gentle but insistent threat as they tease against Nick's lower lip like he can't help but want to bite down, just a little. His hands creep up, lightly cupping Nick's jaw as if he wants to pull him closer but can't bring himself to go that far, instead his thumb rubs these soft circles on the hinge of Nick's jaw, his cheekbone. Nick shivers. He's not used to being touched with such delicacy. 

When they pull back, Nick presses his forehead against Harvey's and laughs. "I knew you were holding out on me, farmboy."

He can feel Harvey's eyelashes fanning against his cheeks, the moment they fly open in panic, so Nick leans down again, presses his mouth softly against Harvey's. It's a delicate kiss, no pressure to it at all. It only takes a couple of seconds before Harvey begins to deepen it, to push up against him and take what he wants. Harvey is tall and solid in a way Nick is not, and he can't say he doesn't appreciate the differences, the way he can push back against him and the boy doesn't give, the way he can skirt his fingers against his biceps, shoulders, and feel the tense line of muscle beneath the skin.

Harvey makes this gorgeous little gasping sound when Nick's fingers slip beneath his shirt and brush against the soft, warm skin of his chest and Nick has to stop himself from making an undignified noise in response. He pulls back again, pressing his forehead into Harvey's shoulder and breathes slowly against the boy's throat. "As much as I would love to take you apart right now - " he feels Harvey swallow beneath him, "we shouldn't get too carried away in case Sabrina wakes up." 

Harvey sits bolt upright against him, sending Nick's equilibrium spinning. "Holy shit, Sabrina." A beat. "Holy shit, _Roz_."

Nick pats him on the shoulder but Harvey shrugs him off. "I'll tell you what I told Sabrina a lifetime ago. I'm more than happy to share."

"You," Harvey tells him, pressing his palms into his eyes, "need to stop talking." 

Nick's mouth feels bruised, tingling a little. That's always looked good on him.

*

Sabrina is tucked into a heavy oak dining table, a golden candelabra in the shape of a stag's head settled in the centre, flames arching up from the sharp points of its antlers. Harvey is sat on her left hand side, Nick at her right, their white shirts unbuttoned, their chests torn open. 

There are two hearts piled onto the gold platter in front of her, so fresh they almost seem like they might beat again, blood pulsing sluggishly from the severed aortas. 

The boys watch attentively as she raises the knife and fork, inspecting them in the candlelight before piercing into the hearts on her plate. She brings the fork to her mouth, a sliver of each heart impaled upon it, and eats.

She eats until the platter is clean. 

Nick holds a glass out to her brimming with dark red wine, and Harvey pours her a glass of water from a heavy silver jug, and Sabrina knows, full or not, she can make room for anything they give her.

Still, everything comes with a price, and she methodically unbuttons her own white blouse, the lace so delicate under her hand she fears it might fall apart from the mere pressure of her fingertips. With her pale chest bared it's easy to dig her nails into the space between her ribs and push. Her fingers sink in with a nauseating sound, curling around the bones and cracking her ribcage clean open.

Slowly, Sabrina reaches in and wraps her hands around her heart, up to the wrist in her own viscera, and plucks it out. She places it on the plate in front of her and slices it down the middle. 

She glances between Harvey and Nick, their faces red and gold in the shifting light and nods her head. They both lean forward, take a half of her heart in their hands and sink their teeth in.

" _Sabrina_."

Sabrina knows that voice well. It's her own.

When she looks over her shoulder the dining table is gone, along with the boys devouring her. 

Instead she is at the foot of her own throne in hell, her other self sitting primly in it. The crown on her head is warped and askew, the girl beneath it devoid of colour.

"Something's going wrong," Other Sabrina says, trying to recenter her crown where it's practically dripping down into her hair.

"You're telling me," she hears herself say, raising her hands, burning again, blue like the moon.

"I think I know how to fix it," Other Sabrina tells her, her hands blurry and almost translucent as she fiddles with the crown some more. "But you're not gonna like it."

Sabrina leans forward and touches the gold crown for her doppleganger, fixing it on her proud head.

Instead, the other her disintegrates underneath her burning touch, the crown in her fingers untouched by the flames.

When she wakes, curled up on the couch in the garage she almost expects the whole place to be on fire.

Gingerly, Sabrina turns over, her back wincing from the flattened springs of the couch. Harvey and Nick are on their feet, watching down over her.

" _My boys_ ," she says, her throat a touch hoarse.

They exchange a look at that, one she's too groggy to unpack. 

"How are you feeling?" Nick asks, crouching down beside her, lacing their hands together.

"Better," she says, "I think I know how to control this thing."

"That so?"

"It's something I really didn't want to do." She squeezes his hand, picturing his heart on her fork.

"That seems about right," Harvey says from above Nick's head. "Why would anything go the way you want it to?"

She turns to Nick again. "Did you break his spirit?"

He grins at her, expression almost as warm as his touch. "Not on purpose."

"How do we fix you, 'Brina?" Harvey asks edging slightly closer.

Nick lays his head on their joined hands. "Better yet, how'd you break?"

Sabrina groans and throws her head back on the arm of the couch. "So the regalia didn't _exactly_ go to plan…"

*

Her hands slightly shaking around a cup of peppermint tea - and really, do they do anything but serve warm drinks in this house? - and nearing two full days without sleep, the protection potion curdling in her stomach, Roz fishes her phone from her overnight back and promptly begins to panic. 

Harvey is not the multiple call or double texting type, so five missed calls has cold sweat prickling at her spine. The mantra of _I'm awful, I'm awful_ comes singing back, twisting up and around her guts because since curling up beside Sabrina in bed he honestly hasn't crossed her mind.

She presses call before the guilty nausea sends the potion flooding back.

"Harvey, are you okay?" She only yawns around one of the words.

"I'm - yes? I'm with Sabrina and Nick and just. Got given a lot of information. Are you? Okay, I mean."

She taps the back of the phone with her fingernail, feeling slightly estranged from her own skin. "Are you guys still at the garage?" 

"Yeah, why?"

"I'm on my way." She ends the call before the hesitant note in his voice becomes a rebuff and throws her leather jacket over her pajama sweats. "Ambrose, I'm gonna get some air."

"Rosalind, I really do think you should get some rest." He is half asleep on the livingroom sofa, a book open across his face.

"You know what they say, no rest for the wicked, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Take your pick." She strides into the hallway before her legs have the chance to fail her.

"Yes well if you don't sleep soon you might well just drop - "

She slams the front door closed before the thought can catch her. She rehearses as she walks - _Harvey, I love you, I just think…_ _Harvey, listen, I think I need some time… Harvey, I can feel people's feelings and oh god, you hate me, I knew it, I'm despicable._

What she actually says, though, stepping into the unsettling quiet of the garage, Sabrina on one side of the room, Harvey and Nick, wide-eyed on the other, is: "You guys look like hell."

Sabrina covers her eyes with her hand and says, "Do _not_ say the H word." 

It's strange, feeling unease ricocheting around her ribs knowing well it doesn't belong to her. It doesn't stop the irritation of it swelling up to meet her. "I would love for someone to explain what the H word is going on here to me, but I really need to talk to Harvey."

"Sabrina, let's leave them to it for sec. You can show me that… thing you mentioned." Nick is already striding across the room and gently touching Sabrina's lower back, easing her towards the door.

"What are you talking about?" She turns in his arms, eyebrows narrowed. "We didn't -"

" _Sabrina_ ," he whispers, more insistently now, and tugs her outside.

Roz can feel the odd flush of embarrassment before she even looks up at Harvey's flushed cheeks. She pats the arm of the couch and throws herself down. "Let's sit."

"I know what I need to talk about, but what do _you_ need to talk about?" He asks her, teasing out his hair with his fingers so he can fixate on the floor.

"Maybe we should just… both go on three."

"Okay, one,"

"Two,"

"Three."

"I kissed Nick," Harvey confesses, in roughly the same breath that Roz tells him, "I think we should break up."

There's a moment of quiet, and Roz worries her lip with her teeth before shattering into laughter. "You kissed _Nick_ ? What was _that_ like?"

"Kinda weird," Harvey says, his cheeks so pink that she thinks she could warm her hands from the heat. "Kinda really good, which is _really annoying_."

"Sounds about right."

Harvey tips his head onto her shoulder and sighs. "So this is where we leave things, huh?"

Roz lets her cheek rest against the softness of his hair. "I'm really sorry. I love you, I do. But I feel like the last couple of days I've seen something in myself, something so big I can barely wrap my head around it. I don't know who I'm even gonna be by the end of the week." He laughs at that, and she does too. "I feel like I'm seeing myself for the very first time, you know? And I need to be alone with that for a while."

He presses a quick chaste kiss against her shoulder and sighs. "You're incredible, Roz."

"You're not so bad yourself, Harv." She presses a kiss into his hair, for the symmetry. "Now, please, tell me all about your flirtations with bisexuality."

He groans against her shoulder and shoves her lightly, until they both dissolve into a giggling heap on the couch. It's nice. There haven't been too many moments of just _nice_ , lately, and Roz will happily cling to it until it's simmered away to nothing.

*

Sabrina looks, if not summarily pissed off, then at least some hybrid of irritated and confused when he tugs her outside. The way the pallid sun that has burnt through the omnipresent Greendale cloud hits her hair makes it look almost like a halo, slightly tangled and ethereally white.

She clears her throat, every bit the girl she is. "Why were you so desperate to get out of there?"

He hadn't quite anticipated sharing this so soon, but. "I may have, somewhat, corrupted your boy."

He can't say he doesn't take some pleasure in the expression, wide eyed, her mouth slightly dropped open, eyebrows low over her eyes. "You did _what_ to my _whom_?"

The coy smile is well practiced, well placed, fingers playing at her sleeve all the better. "Well, really, he kissed me, at least the first time."

"You're lying." She tips her head back against the damp wood of the garage and knocks her shoulder lightly into his. "Harvey would never -"

"The boy is full of surprises," Nick tells her, bending close to whisper in her ear. "And as someone who split herself in two so she could have her cake and eat it, I'm not sure you're in any place to judge."

"Are you mad or are you flirting with me?" 

It's a loaded question, one Nick isn't even sure he can answer. There's still so much in him, jagged and sore and tender beneath her touch. So much that makes him feel like a millstone, a flood away from drowning her. Still, every time he pushes away something drags him back into her orbit, and he's taken enough classes on sacred geometry to know repeated intersection doesn't happen without good reason.

He touches her palm, finger skirting along her lifeline and says, "I'm asking you to acknowledge that when you go running head first into disaster that you're not the only thing in danger."

When she looks up at him her dark eyes are depthless. "What about Harvey."

Nick smiles, just a little. "He's solid. I think we could both do with a little more of that in our lives, don't you?"

Whatever she is about to say is swallowed up by Roz poking her head out of the door, a smile playing on her mouth. "Your majesty," she says to Sabrina, grabbing the hand not currently cradled between Nick's own. "You may now re-enter the throne room."

"I may have filled her in," Harvey says with a shrug when they stumble back inside. It seems so dark in comparison to the hazy light outside, and that's amusing, nocturnal creature that he is, now so easily becoming accustomed to the light.

"You're doing the devil's work, Harvey," Nick says, not allowing his mouth to stumble over the name. 

He gets a short nod back, hardly a twitch, but Nick could read a novel into its subtext.

"So what exactly is the plan for righting the timeline and stopping you from falling apart?" Roz twines herself around Sabrina's arms and does not fall back in line with Harvey.

"Simple," Sabrina says, holding court, as she always does. "We just have to merge."

Harvey splutters. "You mean like… Wait, what?" 

It's darling, it really is. 

"All we have to do is touch," she tells him, sitting primly on the big couch and resting her feet on the table. "Tomorrow we dine in hell. So tonight, I vote take out."

"Here, here!" He says, to get a smile out of her, the feeling none too different to lighting a candle and knowing it will burn the house down.

*

In the rapidly growing gloom of the garage, Roz can almost see the faint gauzy lines that hang between them - Sabrina's boys, her anchor and her acolyte, one gentle tug on the red string away from hanging themselves. It should ache, maybe, the absence of Harvey, the lack some kind of tether between the both of them, even if it's frayed. But mostly, she just feels tired. 

She's dead on her feet and barely able to construct language after their heart to heart and so she excuses herself, tells Sabrina she'll be by in the morning and dissociates somewhere between the closing of the garage door and arriving at her own. She's asleep before her head touches the pillow.

"Little seer, back so soon?" Prudence's voice parts the dark before Roz can make her eyes adjust. The witch is all in black, the soft, ruffled lace of her blouse a perfectly matched contrast to the sturdy leather of her pants, and all of it complimenting the altar she's sprawled atop, spread out like she belongs there. She looks stunning.

"I'm not supposed to be here," Roz says, inspecting the space, the unmistakable haughty reverence that marks out a place of worship. It's more old school Catholicism than the spaces her father uses, but she feels the slight prickle of uncomfortable familiarity anyway. "I'm not even sure where _here_ is. Or how I'm in it, instead of in your mind"

"Both our minds, dear." Prudence tells her, slipping gracefully to her feet. "We're dream sharing. My sisters and I used to do it all the time. I'm guessing that since you're so fledgling at these matters you've opened up a link between us and cannot fathom how to shut it." She brushes her shoulder against Roz's, none too nicely as she saunters past.

"We're dreaming?" Roz follows her down the aisle, looking up at the stained glass, the way the imagery should be familiar but not a single panel is. 

"I'm dreaming." Prudence turns on her heel. " _You_ are eavesdropping." 

The pews are dark wood, and it feels glossy and almost surprisingly solid under Roz's hands. "Why are you dreaming of a church?"

"My father was the High Priest." She leans back against the pew, head tipped back toward the ceiling. "I dreamt my whole life of being High Priestess of the Church of Night. But, well, what's the use of a church without its congregation?"

"Believe me," Roz sighs. "I've heard that one before."

"Come again?" There's a scrutiny to Prudence's look, sharp and searching, and Roz thinks it might be the first time the other girl has really _looked_ at her.

Roz slides into the pew across from the one Prudence is lounging against. "Let's just say my dad's a preacher too."

"Ah, then you understand." The quirk to her mouth is not a smile. "Being part of a church is supposed to make a family out of your community. All it's done for me is cause me to lose the little family I had."

Roz leans over the back of the pew, her cheek tucked into the crook of her elbow. "You have Ambrose."

"Yes," Prudence says, more teeth exposed now, and yet somehow it's even less like a smile, something infinitely more pointed and sad. "And what good did that do me? _Ambrose_ was a distraction."

She feels a kind of protectiveness fluttering behind her sternum. "He's still trying to help you. He's the only reason _I'm_ here -"

"And I should be grateful, should I?" Prudence's voice is like a thunderclap. "That a little fledgling seer who can't even raise a mental ward when she opens a line of telepathy is on my side?"

"Oh, You're good," Roz tells her. "You almost had me wanting to yell back, maybe even storm off. But I'm not letting you swan off in your little suicide mission just because you have some bite in your bark. You're stuck with me now."

"My my," Prudence says, a dark amusement colouring the tone. "What a backbone. I hope my father doesn't pull it out." 

*

"So less than a week ago," Harvey says, digging a spring roll out of the tableau of Chinese takeout boxes spread out between them. "I had just helped save the world, I had an amazing girlfriend, and my biggest problem was getting my history paper in on time." He bites down on the spring roll and shoos Nick's hands away as he tries to pilfer a salt and pepper chicken wing. "And today, I have no girlfriend, and I'm eating cheap takeout with my ex and her ex to prepare to storm the gates of hell. So it's going great."

"I'm just your ex's ex? Kinkle, if you wound me any more I might just bleed out." Nick grasps his chest and slides to the floor, but Harvey is not so distracted he misses Sabrina trying to do away with a forkful of beef chow mein. He puts up a valiant fight but eventually concedes defeat when she widens her eyes and draws out the syllables of her _please._

He's not made of stone. He's barely made of cardboard for that girl.

"Sorry," she says, smiling around the noodles. "Is there somewhere you'd rather be?"

Nick pats Harvey's thigh, the heat of him bleeding through the corduroy. "It's better to commiserate with friends." 

"Is that what you call it?" Harvey tries not to blush as Nick leans his chin on the hand, his head nestled in Harvey's lap, peering up at him from the floor.

"Oh, if you want some cold comfort, Farmboy, you need only ask." He flutters his eyelashes, tongue flicking out to wet his lower lip.

"Boys! My innocent eyes can't take this!" Sabrina swats Harvey on the arm, and Nick on the head, but that only seems to encourage him, since he grabs her by the wrist and squeezes.

"There's always room for you, sweetheart." His smile is positively sinful. He brings her hand to his mouth and kisses it softly, then worries the skin with his teeth for a sharp, hot moment.

"Harvey," she says, her cheeks somewhat flushed and refusing to look at Nick in the same way he is. "If it makes you feel better I tried to burn away my feelings for the two of you, and somehow I'm still stuck here."

Nick laughs and kisses her palm. "You tried the candle trick? Spellman, I _know_ you're better than that. Besides, it tends to work best if you're _not_ then spending time with and relying on the person you're trying to burn out. It gets rid of old feelings, it doesn't stop you from developing them all over again."

He draws his fingertips all around the back of her hand, teasing out the indentations from his own teeth.

Harvey swallows, and it feels like a sonic boom in the quiet. "Is anyone else hot? Like, it's so warm in here." He tugs off his flannel, feeling more comfortable stripped to his t-shirt for approximately three seconds, when Nick whistles lowly.

"Dinner and a strip show? Best night of my young life." Nick's still smiling filthily, like he just can't help himself, and Harvey can still feel the warm touch of his hands skating across his chest, the insistent pressure of his mouth on his own, and his mind is maybe one touch away from unraveling.

"You guys, I was really looking forward to this food." Sabrina pouts, her hand still held captive by Nick, whose expression seems to have become permanently half-lidded. 

Harvey's not sure if his eyes will be able to regain focus any time soon, or when he'll be able to control his own mouth because he says, "Isn't takeout always better the next morning?" 

Nick takes this as an invitation, because he's sprawled halfway across Harvey's chest before Harvey has processed the end of his own sentence. "I like the way you think, Kinkle." 

There's something even more tense about him, the way he's pressed against Harvey's chest but is holding himself rigid, a kind of performative wantonness that Harvey could not have picked up on if he hadn't been here before. Nick brushes a hand against Harvey's cheek and pulls him, just a little, just enough to make their lips brush.

"Are you okay, man?" Harvey whispers against Nick's mouth, all the sound smothered between them.

Nick nods, small, fast, and surges forward again, sliding his mouth hot and quick against Harvey's, his hand sinking into the other boy's hair. It's a delirious kiss, all teeth and tongue, Nick's nails raking down his scalp. If Harvey weren't being so insistently pressed into the couch by Nick's body he might have floated away on the feeling. Harvey's kissed a few girls, but no one who does it like this, the demanding push-pull of him, teasing and then pulling back so Harvey is forced to follow. His hands are everywhere, in his hair, skirting along his stomach and Harvey's own feel so clumsy in comparison but he tries to match him, slides his hands into Nick's curls and lightly tugs and Nick goes boneless against him.

"Was," Harvey swallows. "Was that okay?"

" _Harvey_ ," Nick draws out his name like it's something sinful. "If you don't do that again I'll take it as a personal offense."

Somewhere on earth, very far away from the warm friction of Nick's body against his, Sabrina clears her throat.

"Are you quite finished?" Her arms are folded, and her cheeks are flushed.

"Oh, Spellman," Nick says, his breath hot on Harvey's neck as he turns to her. "I have barely begun." 

His hands slide away from Harvey's body and twine with her's, tugging her closer so he can reel her in, too, and the next thing he knows, Harvey has the both of them practically in his lap, Nick plastering himself against Sabrina and kissing her with the same fire he had Harvey.

It's almost unbearably hot, seeing Sabrina like this. Even their most intense make out sessions were delicate affairs, Harvey's hands so big he was careful when spanning her waist or pressing into her lower back, and Sabrina so cautious and semi-detached she refused to lose herself in him. There's no such problem here. With Nick she grabs at his arms, his back, nails digging in with a kind of carnal ferocity Harvey could not have dreamed up, and Nick rolls with her, takes everything she'll give him and then some, his body pliant but responsive to the briefest touch. 

He isn't sure what possesses him to do it, maybe the heat, or the strange hysteria cultivated between them or maybe just to see Nick's body turn loose again, but Harvey sinks his fingers back into Nick's hair and tugs again, slightly sharper, and Nick _moans_. He's back on Harvey in an instant, kissing along his throat, the slight swell of his collarbone where it peeks from the neck of his t-shirt. And then Sabrina is there, her small, cool fingers turning his head to see her, her mouth reddened from Nick's kiss. He wonders if he looks like that, too. She smiles at him, her pupils blown, her headband askew, and pulls him in for a kiss. 

If kissing Nick is like nothing Harvey's ever known then kissing Sabrina is like coming home. He remembers the soft rhythm of it, her mouth plush and sure. He could kiss her for hours - has done, but there's a certain urgency to where they are, to what tomorrow holds. 

Before he can parse that thought, though, Nick has slid his thigh between Harvey's, their hips rocking together, and Harvey really might scream, he's not sure he's ever been this hard in his _life_. His breath is harsh between kisses, and he jumps every time Nick's fingers brush his chest, hot under his shirt again. They flit against his nipples, then brush back down his side, all so fleeting he can't reorient himself. 

Harvey's hands are on Sabrina but marking a similar path to Nick's, only she's so slight beneath him that just by brushing her chest he covers her whole breast, thumbs rough even through the material of her shirt. He wants - he wants so much more than he can put words to.

Sabrina pulls back and studies him, her eyes darker than he's ever seen them, her throat flushed pink - he dreads to think the mess Nick has made of his - then she begins to push up his t-shirt, to see how Nick is taking him apart. She kisses Nick's throat as he works Harvey over, mapping him out with his hands and grinding their hips together, and he really might fall apart at any moment -

"Wait," he says, his voice so hoarse he can barely make it work. "This isn't…" Nick's hands still, and they're so warm as they press into his oblique muscles. "I want this _so_ bad. Like I think I might shoot myself for saying this, but I don't wanna lose my virginity on the floor of a garage because we're scared of going to hell in the morning."

"Kinkle you're killing me," Nick drops his forehead against Harvey's chest, sweaty and slick against his skin.

Sabrina laughs and strokes his hair, kissing Harvey softly again. "We'll have our chance. We've got all the time in the world."

Harvey closes his eyes and tries to catch his breath.

  
  


*

When Sabrina wakes, on the concrete floor of the garage, Harvey’s heavy arm thrown over her stomach and Nick’s chest pillowing her head, she can’t help but think _that’s the best I’ve slept in days._

She kind wants to just curl up, pin herself in the moment and stay in the warm, content embrace of the boys, untouched by consequence and fate and the sharp tug of her birthright pulling her back into hell. There’s still that pulse of power inside, like a black hole, desperate to swallow the girl of her and leave nothing behind. It’s hard not to be afraid that taking the crown will set it loose. She sits up a little, to brush the hair back behind Nick’s ear, thinking of the pleading way he’d looked at her when he told her she wanted power - he’d been right, the Morningstar nature and Zelda's nurture near enough ensured it. But there's a power in this, too. In letting herself be held up or held down in the life she fought for herself.

Harvey shifts beside her, his hand curling into her side and pulling her a little bit closer into him and she knows nothing is going to make her sacrifice this.

She sits up even further, leans over to press her lips against Nick and kiss him awake, because it's subversive in all the right ways, comfort and mockery in equal measure and she knows it's the right call when he smiles against her mouth. 

"If this is Prudence messing with me I _will_ kill her," he says, cupping her jaw. 

"Real deal Sabrina," she tells him, pulling his hand so it can press against her forehead, her cheek, her ribcage right in front of her heart. "Accept no substitutes."

Harvey grumbles something inarticulate into the floor, and they both move as one to surround him, pressed in at both sides, no escape route from the reality of the night before.

Sabrina kisses his forehead and Nick the back of his knuckles and the moment Harvey opens his eyes Nick leans down and purrs, "Good morning, lover," into the skin of his throat. 

Harvey's whole body freezes beneath them, his eyes wide, and Sabrina can't help but laugh as she smooths the creases away from his forehead. "This is adorable, but we don't have time for gay panic this morning, Harv. We have a hell to reclaim."

He laughs. "More kicking myself for letting you guys _stop_."

She kisses him then, too, can't not, the warmth in her chest threatening to bloom outward and smother her if she doesn't. They're all sort of heaped in a pile, half dressed and half desperate from the night before, clinging to each other, when Roz and Theo bound in, the latter promptly dropping his coke can and spilling it out across the concrete floor.

"Well," Roz says, staring a hole into the floor and passing her sword from hand to hand. "Didn't see _that_ coming."

Sabrina feels herself go pink, slipping away from the tangled limbs and pulling her sweatshirt down. Harvey is similarly quick to redress, his fingers fumbling with the buttons of his flannel as he goes. Nick, unbothered by modesty, simply waves from the floor. 

Theo waves back, and elbows Roz in the side. "Is he part of the gang, now?"

Roz, furiously studying the patterns the coke is spreading across the floor, replies, "I am not sure I wanna know." 

Dressed and only slightly mortified, Sabrina jumps up and claps her hands together. "Who's ready to go to hell?" 

"As long as we're all dressed, sure." Roz says, facing the door, now. 

Harvey pulls Nick to his feet and whispers something Sabrina can't make out. When they all join hands, though, she makes sure she's holding Nick's just that little bit tighter. 

In a breath, they move from Sabrina's mortal life to her infernal one, carried below in a swirl of flame. 

Harvey and Theo fall behind as Sabrina, Roz, and Nick make a wall with their bodies as they stand in the throne room, the flickering light colouring them all an unholy red. Other Sabrina and Lucifer are hissing at one another over the head of the throne, the vicious curved points of their crowns making them look like animals about to lock horns. Sabrina steels herself, her grip vicious, as she strides forward. 

Lilith, pushing herself between the warring house of Morningstar catches sight of them before the others, and sighs. "Here we go again," she mutters, massaging her temple.

" _Sabrina_ ," she hears herself say, that dark thing that had occupied her throat in the garage flooding back. "It's time."

Her father whirls towards them, eyes a terrible gold. "What have you done now, you insolent child?" He storms forward and Nick stiffens beside her, so Sabrina runs her thumb along the edge of his knuckles and holds on tight.

"I saved your ass from being encased in stone by Caliban and kept the throne under the Morningstar name." She sneers. "A little thank you might be nice."

"Sabrina, dear," Lilith calls down just as Lucifer's nostrils begin to flare, her elbow resting on Other Sabrina's shoulder, a red painted nail resting against the crown. "If you're playing with mandrake roots again I might be inclined to throttle you."

Theo mutters, "Don't remind me," from behind her, but Sabrina is fixated on her other self, perched on the throne.

"Not quite," Other Sabrina says, ducking away from the other woman's touch. "Time travel."

"Ah, of course. Time travel." Lilith squeezes her eyes shut and touches her temples again. "Why wouldn't it be time travel?"

"They need to reconvene. Merge." Roz says, her hand clammy in Sabrina's own. "Otherwise they might both fall apart, and maybe time too."

"Well, that explains the recent… malfunctions, doesn't it dear?" Lilith squeezes Other Sabrina's shoulder. "Our little sex pest hurricane torture session was more a light gale, wasn't it?" 

Other Sabrina stares her down, gold flecks in her dark eyes. "You know, when we converge all my memories will be yours. Everything I've done here will be on your hands, too."

"I can live and atone," Sabrina replies, her friends hands in hers pinning her down.

"Or you will simply succumb to what you are," Lucifer says, smiling now, stepping beside the other version of her and brushing her hair back. "As long as my blood runs through you, you will have the stomach for every sin. You are a child of hell, little girl. _That_ is your destiny."

Sabrina shrugs. "We'll see." She drops Roz and Nick's hands and moves towards her mirror self, looking for anything that might set them apart, that might mark one out for monstrosity and the other for good. 

"Are you ready?" She asks herself.

Other Sabrina offers her hands, and Sabrina takes them, gripping tightly enough that they might slip together without any interference. " _Utram totius. Totum erimus. Utram totius. Totum erimus."_

Her breath catches in her chest for a moment, Other Sabrina's eyes boring into her, the golden flecks joining together to make a nine pointed star bursting from her pupil, and then she's whole again, two girls colliding into one. Every moment of hell burns through her mind - her father walking her through each level of hell, dipping her her hand in the boiling blood pits of seventh and freezing her tongue to the wailing bones of a woman in the ninth; Lilith gripping her fingers until the skin rubbed away as she taught Sabrina to whip the fraudulent, telling her _if you are to rule hell you must understand its customs, even the less savoury ones;_ the moaning that droned eternally through the day and drilled straight through her skull. Sabrina remembers all of it.

Her fingers flicker into blue flame almost instantly, her eyes blind to anything but the repeated fury and horror of tearing souls apart. She's Sabrina Morningstar, and her insides are full of righteous light.

Lucifer smiles beside her and readjusts her crown. "That's my girl."

  
  


*

Roz feels it the moment before Sabrina catches fire, a sharp noise of pain piercing through Roz's skull as her insides begin to heat.

"Nick," She whispers, her palms sweating. "Hold my hand. I need a boost."

When he looks at her he's painstruck, the light from Sabrina's fire reflected in his eyes. "What are you talking about?"

"Just do it."

Nick's hand is cooler than Sabrina's had been, but that's not much of a shock. Neither, really, is the cold brush of fear that comes through from his touch. She can't imagine what he went through with the devil in his head, and she won't press the bruise to find out. Instead, she feels for that flicker of magic in him where it's curled up in his chest and sinks her nails in. 

She focuses on Sabrina, smothered up to her elbows now in eerie blue flames, her cheeks streaked with tears. Lucifer leans in to stroke her cheek and she raises a burning hand to ward him off but all he does is laugh.

"Light is my gift," he tells her. "It cannot harm me." He wipes a tear away with a sharply pointed nail and Sabrina makes a small, hurt sound that has Nick's nails biting into Roz's hand.

"I'm gonna get our girl," she tells him, and follows the insistent throb of Sabrina's pain like a tunnel to the girl within.

_Sabrina, can you hear me?_ The first thing she notices about Sabrina's mind is that it's blinding. It's nothing like being planted within Prudence's body, looking through her eyes, feeling her tug of gravity. Sabrina's mind is a light trap, and Roz feels as disembodied as she is, unmoored and unable to find something to pin herself to.

_Sabrina, it's Roz._ Even though she doesn't have a voice, it echoes around the expanse. _If you don't answer I'm gonna have to come hunting. I'm not leaving here unless I'm dragging you with me._

The quiver of pain shakes through again, rocking through the white light like an earthquake, an orange flame flickering at the edge of Roz's vision, but no matter how much she turns she cannot find it. _Sabrina, goddammit._

There's a small sound, barely a whimper, but Roz clamps down on it and drags her way to Sabrina. 

She's curled up on her side, tiny against the infinite backdrop, a fire around her, a crown at her feet.

_Sabrina? What happened?_

The girl sits up, slightly. Her eyes are whited out, her little body wracked with tears. _Roz?_

_Yeah, 'Brina, it's me. I'm putting you back in control, okay?_

Sabrina presses her face into her knees. _I can't._

_Yeah,_ Roz tells her, _you can. And you will._

Sabrina shakes her head. _Roz, it was me, I did things in hell. He didn't have to lead me to all of them, I just picked it up. The family business._

Roz can almost feel the heat of the fire around her, the flames growing higher the harder she cries. _Sabrina, he forced you into this. You were changing hell before he got back, and I know you can do that again. But if you don't get back in the driver's seat he's gonna be in control of it all._

Sabrina let's a hand brush against the growing flames. _But he can't be touched by the fire._

_So what will work on him?_

_Oh, Caliban._ Sabrina sits up, something swimming to the forefront of her mind and projected onto the white expanse. Sabrina, encased in stone, Lucifer and Lilith on either side and all of them immovable. _In the other timeline, Caliban trapped us all in hell so he could take earth for hell. But I can't risk freeing him._

Roz is almost giddy. _Your aunt Zelda kept Nagaina's head, didn't she? If she's like a gorgon, and her gaze could turn witches to stone, her powers coming from something older than the Abrahamic faiths -_

_It could trap him too._ Sabrina beams at her, growing in size. _Roz you're a genius._

_Can you summon it here? Like bring it down?_ She can taste the tang of copper on her tongue, so close to solving the puzzle, each move like a satisfying _click_ inside her, falling into place.

_If I bring it to myself he'll stop me. But if I give it to you, he won't see it coming._ Sabrina rolls her head back on her shoulders. _You ready to be a hero?_

When she comes back into her body, Harvey is gripping Nick's free hand with his right and her sword with his other, and Theo has hers, a wall of blue flame separating them from the royalty beyond. 

"Hey," Theo says, eyes huge with concern. "Where'd you go?"

Roz can't help but smile. "Sabrina's mind. I'm kind of… telepathic now. And we have a damn good plan." She squeezes Nick's hand. "You need to protect Harvey and Theo." 

He nods, solemnly, but Harvey drops his hand and grabs from Roz. "What are you gonna do?"

She smiles at him, soft as she can muster when his fear and her adrenaline are battering up against her ribs. "I'm gonna save Sabrina. Trust me, I know what I'm doing." 

"Roz," he squeezes harder on her arm, like that will make her plant her feet, make her safe under his touch, but she brushes his hand away. 

"Trust me, Harvey." 

She steps forward, inches from the flames, and screams "Sabrina, _now_."

Nick yanks Harvey back when he reaches for her, his fingers just brushing against her spine as she walks through the fire, the thread of Sabrina's magic pulling her safely through. Nagaina's head is heavy in her fingers, a blindfold covering its eyes. 

She catches Sabrina's stare, focused now, victorious, and nods. Both girls shield their eyes as Roz raises the head and rips the covering away, feeling the blunt force of its power pulsing from it. The sound of cracking rock floods the echoing cavern.

When she lowers it, careful to cover the eyes again, Lucifer is mere steps away, his claw outstretched to her, his face preserved in animal fury. And then he isn't, he's shattered at Roz's feet, Sabrina standing tall behind him. 

Roz can feel her heart pounding in her throat, her mouth stretch into a grin, neither her nor Sabrina able to find their breath.

The guards descend in the pandemonium, and Roz turns to see Nick holding wards around the mortals, muttering in Latin beneath his breath, the wall of fire extinguished. Harvey and Theo close ranks behind him, Theo grabbing for the shotgun strapped to his back, but before he can aim at the encroaching demons Sabrina screams " _Enough_ ," and the hoards give pause.

"This is _my_ throne, not his." There is something in her voice, commanding, a dark-touched undertone. " _I_ am the heir of Morningstar and I will bring light to the dark."

She turns to Lilith, emerging from behind the throne and dusting herself off. "Scatter the parts so he can't be made whole. He can't come for you if he can't be raised."

Lilith almost smiles. "And what of the monarchy?" 

"Well," Sabrina says, the crown dangling from her finger. "I think I've proved my mettle," she kicks at the rubble of her father. "And my judgement." She smiles at Roz. "I may be tempted to appoint you as my regent, to keep an eye on things below." 

Lilith does grin, then, her teeth sharp and white beneath the bloodstain of her lipstick. 

"But, things are changing. And I have final say." Sabrina steps towards her, crown in hand. "No more torturing innocents."

Lilith tilts her head. "May I still torture the guilty?"

Sabrina shrugs. "Go nuts." She hands Lilith the gold crown, who snatches it up and holds it to her heart. Sabrina turns towards Roz, towards her friends, a smile playing on her lips before she throws her head back over her shoulder. "And Lilith? Know that if you try to go against me, I can crumble you too."

Then Sabrinas has thrown herself into Roz's arms, and Roz only barely catches her, swung off balance and felled by the shock. "Holy fuck we did it."

Sabrina throws her head back and yells, "Boys, get your asses up here."

And then they're surrounded on all sides, pressed in and held together, the golden cords of connection binding them irrevocably.

*

Even standing in the doorway of the Spellman house, lightly singed but all of them whole, Nick cannot stop stiffening, Harvey's fingers warm on his back. He's stuck in the recurring imagery of Lucifer's hand on Sabrina's cheek, the way his eyes had found Nick's and sliced right through him. Of Sabrina trapped inside herself, him frozen in place. 

The smell of smoke on his clothes makes him want to throw up.

Hilda has them all bundled inside and warmed with scones and sweet tea but he can't even force that down. None of them have said a word since returning to earth, but Harvey is a constant weight against his side, solid, assured. He lets himself sink into it, just a little, his head pressed underneath Harvey's chin. Zelda's eyes are sharp on him, but he's stared down worse.

Sabrina bears the brunt of the yelling and the hugs, the rest of them hardly collateral damage - though Roz gets an earful from Ambrose, which she happily tunes out, the Gorgon head still cradled in her lap. Nick is not keeping track of it all, really, his body aching with the muscle-memory of his last stay in hell. 

He catches Sabrina's fingers beneath the table, fitting them together. She looks up at him and something terrible crosses her features, something he wants to press away with his fingertips, with his body, with his words. But then she's standing over him, cupping his chin with her fingers and saying, "I need a nap, what about you?"

Zelda hisses something at them as Sabrina pulls him upstairs, Harvey tucked into Nick's hands and pulled along, too, but Nick can't hear it over the ringing in his ears. 

She turns to him when the door is shut and kisses him, a gentle thing, so soft he can barely stand it, but before he can pull her in, press her against him until they are inextricable she pulls away and pulls down the duvet. "Get in," she orders, and what choice does he have?

Sabrina presses against his front, and Harvey lines his back and Nick is on the brink of consciousness, the brink of something like the abyss before he knows it.

"It's over," Sabrina says against his forehead, pressing her lips there.

"We're all right here," Harvey breathes against the back of his neck. 

  
  


*

Ambrose has had a crease between his eyebrows as they begin picking through the books again, trying to read up on eldritch lore to plot Blackwood's next moves. He hasn't said much, except to throw an offhand, "I'm learning _exactly_ why you and my cousin are such close friends."

She isn't sure that's a compliment, but she smiles anyway. 

She's flicking idly through a decaying copy of the dead sea scrolls when the vision hits. It comes in flashes, time becoming non-linear, Blackwood with a sword above his head, the twins' bodies unravelling like pulled threads, something full of teeth and feathers tearing holes in the sky, Blackwood laughing with half a jaw, feathers sprouting from the gap. 

When she comes back to herself, Ambrose is peering up at her with ill-disguised reverence. "You had a premonition."

"I saw Blackwood." She doesn't wait for a response - before Ambrose can breathe she's already storming down the well-worn telepathic path between herself and Prudence.

_Prudence_ , she hisses, taking in the damp dark, the ground marshy beneath their feet. Roz cannot see two foot in front of herself, no light but the cloud-smothered moon.

_Hush, little seer. I'm concentrating_. Prudence has her hand pressed into the rough bark of an oak tree, her magic quivering through it and into the roots below. 

_I've seen your father. What he's going to do. He's going to start the apocalypse_. Roz would shiver if she could, but Prudence's spine is straight and set as ever.

_I could have told you that, Cassandra._ Prudence shuts her eyes, the moon now shuttered out too, and Roz is left to feel the swelling of the darkness.

_I've seen what god he's razing, the steps he has to take to do it. Prudence, we can beat him._

The sound of laughter floods the dark. _I'm getting the twins and Agatha out of his clutches. Anything more is fantasy. He will destroy you, Rosalind._

Something shifts within her, surety coming home to anchor in Roz's chest. _Listen, I've just got back from Hell and pulled it's wayward daughter back from the brink. With strength in numbers? I'd like to see him try his best._

_Not Sabrina,_ Prudence says flatly _._

_And Ambrose, and the aunties, and Nick and Marie. And maybe the hordes of hell if we ask nicely. With my amplification powers? We're gonna be invincible._

She cannot see it, but she can feel Prudence's smile part the dark. _You're an irritating little mortal aren't you?_ And then, more softly _, thank you._

And Roz can't help but think she'd do anything to feel as righteous and warm as she does now. 

_That's power, fledgling_ , Prudence supplies.

And Roz thinks, _yeah, it is._

*

  
Sabrina has her ear pressed against Nick's chest, his heart beating calmly beneath her. Her hand is twinned with Harvey across his stomach, his touch rough and warm against hers. Downstairs she can hear Ambrose and Roz speaking fast and animatedly, her aunts pitching in in well timed intervals. She thinks, _okay, this is more like it,_ and lets her eyes close

**Author's Note:**

> writing this really took me back to the kinds of fic I read on buffy forums when I was a kid, so this is almost a love letter to that kind of fast paced plotty fic I have never really touched before - it was fun! & I'll probably never do it again...
> 
> i'm on tumblr! [@bohemicns](http://www.bohemicns.tumblr.com), let's chat!


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